My Favorite April Fool

Happy Birthday to Fosco's college roommate, Jeremy! Come home from Hong Kong soon--Miss Tabby misses you.

If you don't know where Fosco got this cake, you're missing out.

Rounding Up Food, Again

"Foodie Friday" continues at Fosco Lives!

Here's a roundup of some very cool foodie things for the week:

• Fosco has been in love with kolaches for years, ever since Todd's remarkable parents introduced him to them. They buy them every so often at some ethnic bakery (Czech would make the most sense, but I don't think it's actually a Czech bakery) near St. Joseph, Michigan. In Fosco's experience, kolaches are kind of like heavy cookies with fruit filling and thick sugar glaze (like a crust, almost). I think Todd's parents normally get apricot and raspberry--both are good.
  
  UPDATE: Check the Comments section below for more information on this West Michigan bakery. It turns out that I was almost entirely wrong about everything. (What else is new...)
  
  Well, in this month's Gourmet, there is a feature article on kolaches! Apparently, the kolache capital of this country is central Texas(!), where the descendants of Czech settlers have created a kolache culture. Both the pictures and descriptions seem slightly different from the Western Michigan kolaches that Fosco is so fond of (these appear to be more like danishes), but they still look (and sound) amazing.
  
  But the best part? There is a chain of stores called The Kolache Factory (with locations all over the Midwest and Great Plains). Imagine--an entire factory dedicated to making kolaches! I am having "Willy Wonka" visions, yes I am. (Apparently, there is one in Austin. Hint, hint, John Mackey and AEJ.)
  
  
• I've mentioned before that I am now enthralled with Jean-Georges Vongerichten's blog. Well, recently J-G used his blog to announce two new innovations at his flagship restaurant in NYC:
  
  • the "select menu": a four-course meal of three signature dishes plus your choice of a dessert flight, all for $58. Even though the selected signature dishes are not quite as exciting as his frogs legs or black sea bass, this menu is an absolute steal at this price. This is a wonderful concession to a bad economy--thank you, J-G!
    
  • half glasses of wine: perfect for people like Fosco who like to taste a little wine, but who rarely want to finish a whole glass. As Jean-Georges notes:
    

    I noticed that people getting together at the bar would start with a glass of wine, and then be stuck in the awkward position of wanting to stay a little while longer, but not for another full glass. (Think first dates.) In the dining room, customers wanted to pair different wines with different courses, but didn’t want a full glass with each course. And colleagues who came in for lunch celebrations would want to order champagne, but a full glass is a bit much when you need to return to work. (In these times, it’s more important than ever to celebrate professional achievements.) Perhaps most importantly, I wanted diners who drove to my restaurants to drive home safely.

    I think this is brilliant, although I can't help but imagine the disdain the French will feel if they ever hear about it.
  
  
• Speaking of Jean-Georges, Mark Bittman explains a beet-roasting technique he learned from J-G himself. He also has an easy recipe for eating them:
  

  a dressing of walnuts, garlic and fresh orange juice. Note that all of these have some bitterness or acidity, which counter the sweetness of beets beautifully. To tame the garlic, I cook it quickly, along with the walnuts; toasting always makes nuts nuttier. This makes the purée smoother tasting as well.

  Fosco lurves beets and this sounds like a great preparation.
  
  
• You may know that the French Laundry (the best restaurant in the country) is located in the Napa Valley town of Yountville. Well, it turns out that, as Thomas Keller's restaurant empire grows, so do the ambitions of Yountville. As this article notes, Yountville is positioning itself to become the capital of Napa. As one resident suggests, Yountville is now the one stop that a person needs to make in Napa:
  

  "It's an experiential village — you can stay, eat, go to all these different restaurants, check out great art, enjoy the wine. It's what makes Times Square, Times Square. Yountville is the rural Times Square."

  Hmmm. An odd comparison, I think. Even so, Fosco is currently scheming a trip to Yountville; he'll keep you updated.
  
  
• Fosco's favorite Queen of Good Living, Jill of Stella's Roar, did some cooking and some mixology recently. Check out her amazing Gumbo YaYa and the filthily-named Black Snake Moan cocktail. I'm a little in awe of her lifestyle.

Would you care for the "Drum Roll of Colonial Fish"?

Please to be enjoying "Foodie Friday" here at Fosco Lives!

Fosco missed an important anniversary last Friday: the one hundredth birthday of the Futurist Manifesto. The Manifesto was published by F.T. Marinetti on the front page(!) of Le Figaro. As the BBC notes, the Manifesto seems like a strange thing to celebrate:

It called for the demolition of museums and libraries, contempt for women and the glorification of war, "the world's only hygiene".

It promoted "the beautiful ideas which kill" and claimed that beauty exists only in struggle - so why is the art world celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto?

Because when it appeared, on 20 February 1909, it was the first art manifesto of the 20th Century, paving the way for Vorticists, Surrealists, Dada-ists, and Situationists, as well as more recent cultural agitators like the Stuckists.

Sure, it's all a bit creepy and proto-fascistic, but don't you have to appreciate (even a little) a movement that so entirely attempts to revalue all values? Personally, Fosco has always loved tenet #4 of the Manifesto:

We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

I can guarantee that Dale Earnhardt Jr. agrees with that one.

The best reason for us to talk about Futurism on "Foodie Friday" is Marinetti's 1932 publication of The Futurist Cookbook. There aren't many "isms" that provide their own recipes and there is no cookbook that is as amazingly bizarre and hilarious as this one. Actually, the genre confusion is part of the fun here: is this really a cookbook? Is this literature? Is it some kind of imaginary food-writing? Whatever it is, here is Fosco's favorite recipe (not that he's ever tried it, of course):

HEROIC WINTER DINNER (from the “Futurist Cookbook”, 1932)

A group of soldiers who at three o’clock on a January afternoon will have to get into a lorry to enter the line of fire at four, or go up in an aeroplane to bomb cities or counter-attack enemy flights, would seek in vain the perfect preparation for these in the grieving kiss of a mother, of a wife, of children or in re-reading passionate letters.

A dreamy walk is equally inappropriate. So is the reading of an amusing book. Instead these fighters sit down round a table where they are served a ‘DRUM ROLL OF COLONIAL FISH’ and some ‘RAW MEAT TORN BY TRUMPET BLASTS’.

“DRUM ROLL OF COLONIAL FISH”: Poached mullet marinated for twenty-four hours in a sauce of milk, rosolio liqueur, capers and red pepper. Just before serving the fish open it and stuff it with date jam interspersed with discs of banana and slices of pineapple. It will then be eaten to a continuous rolling of drums.

“RAW MEAT TORN BY TRUMPET BLASTS”: cut a perfect cube of beef. Pass an electric current
through it, then marinate it for twenty-four hours in a mixture of rum, cognac and white vermouth. Remove itfrom the mixture and serve on a bed of red pepper, black pepper and snow. Each mouthful is to be chewed carefully for one minute, and each mouthful is divided from the next by vehement blasts on the trumpet blown
by the eater himself.

When it is time for the Peralzarsi; the soldiers are served plates of ripe persimmons, pomegranates, and blood oranges. While these disappear into their mouths, some very sweet perfumes of roses, jasmine, honeysuckle and acacia flowers will be sprayed around the room, the nostalgic and decadent sweetness of which will be roughly rejected by the soldiers who rush like lightning to put their gas masks on.

The moment they are about to leave they swallow the Throat–Explosion, a solid liquid consisting of a pellet of Parmesan cheese steeped in Marsala.

Of course, the question of how seriously to take this is part of the proper enjoyment of the Futurists (at least for contemporary readers). The strange thing is how similar this kind of recipe is to the actual contemporary culinary practice of chefs like Grant Achatz or Homaro Cantu.

If this kind of food writing thrills you, you may enjoy even more the setting of the Marinetti's cookbook to music! American composer Aaron Jay Kernis has written The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine for string quartet and narrator. A recording is available on this CD.


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Saturday Story Hour: Bolaño's Fake Nazi Poetry

Good Morning: Welcome to Saturday Story Hour!

Even though it's February, we are not done with the great Roberto Bolaño! At this point, Fosco has almost worked through the translated Bolaño oeuvre, and he still adores him. Luckily, we have more works to come as Bolaño continues to be translated into English (and we have another one due this summer!).

The most recent Bolaño book that Fosco read is the faux literary encyclopeadia, Nazi Literature in the Americas. In a NY Times review last spring (enjoyably titled "The Sound and the Führer"), Stacey D'Erasmo describes the work:

Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, “Nazi Literature” is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures à la “The Producers” they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible.

Indeed, each biographical sketch is a fully-realized portrait of a life, completely convincing in both the general trajectory and the minute details. The sketches are also, frequently, laugh-out-loud funny.

In today's installment of "Saturday Story Hour," Fosco excerpts one of the funniest passages from the book--a passage that gives free rein to the full ingenuity of Bolaño's imagination. The three paragraphs below are from the portrait of "Pedro González Carrera." The first sentence of this portrait is "A few hagiographies of Pedro González Carrera have come down to us; all concur in affirming, and perhaps with good reason, that his work was as brilliant as his life was dull" (61). And from there, things start to become very strange...

An excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas, translated by Chris Andrews:

[González] stubbornly continued to exploit his peculiar poetic vein. The next three poems he published (not in Iron Heart, which had folded, but in the cultural supplement of a Santiago newspaper) are free of surrealist images, symbolist baggage and modernist vagaries (González, it must be said, knew almost nothing of the three schools in question). His verse had become concise, his images simple; the figures that recurred in the six previous poems have also undergone a transformation: the Merovingian warriors have become robots, the women are now dying beside putrid streams of consciousness, and the mysterious tractors plowing the fields without rhyme or reason are either secret vessels sent from Antarctica, or Miracles (with a capital letter). And now these figures were counterbalanced by a sketchy presence, that of the author himself, adrift in the vast spaces of the fatherland, observing the apparitions like a registrar of marvels, but unenlightened finally as to their causes, phenomenology or ultimate purpose.

In 1955, at the cost of great personal sacrifice and tremendous effort, González financed the publication of a chapbook containing twelve poems, printed by a press in Cauquenes, capital of the province of Maul, where he had been transferred. The little book was entitled Twelve, and the cover, which was the author's own work, is noteworthy in its own right, as it was the first of many drawings he produced to accompany his poems (the others came to light only after his death). The letters of the word Twelve on the cover, equipped with eagle talons, grip a swastika in flames, beneath which there seems to be a sea with waves, drawn in a childlike style. And under the sea, between the waves, a child can in fact be glimpsed, crying, "Mom, I'm scared!" The speech bubble is blurred. Under the child and the sea are lines and blotches, which might be volcanoes or printing defects.

The twelve new poems add new figures and landscapes to the repertoire developed in the previous nine. The robots, the streams of consciousness and the ships are supplemented with Destiny and Will, personified by two stowaways in the holds of a ship, as well as The Disease Machine, The Language Machine, The Memory Machine (which has been damaged since the beginning of time), The Potentiality Machine and The Precision Machine. The only human figure in the earlier poems (that of González himself) is joined by the Advocate of Cruelty, a strange character who sometimes speaks like a regular Chilean guy (or rather, like a grammar school teacher's idea of a regular guy) and sometimes like a sibyl or a Greek soothsayer. The setting is the same as for the earlier poems: an open field in the middle of the night, or a theater of colossal dimensions situated in the heart of Chile. (64-65)

I don't know about you, but I wish those poems actually existed--like almost all of the works described in this book. This is part of the genius of Bolaño's achievement here: he's created a reality that, despite some of its horror, you wish were actually real.

From the "Finally" File

Heeding calls by, well everyone (including Fosco), the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services has removed young Adolf Hitler Campbell from his parents' custody. In addition, the State has taken little Adolf's younger sisters (that's Joyce Lynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, if you're keeping track).

According to a report from an NBC News affiliate,

DYFS isn’t talking much about the Campbell’s situation, but the kids being taken away has nothing to do with the names and birthday cake issue in December, according to Sgt. John Harris, Holland Twp. Police in Milford, N.J.

You know who else isn't talking? The parents. However, that's for another reason:

Calls to the children’s parents were met with a message that the line had been temporarily disconnected.

While the tribulations of the rural poor (and the urban poor, for that matter) are never a laughing matter, I think we can make an exception here.

Memories of Rummy

Fosco suspects that, when history fully apportions the blame for all of the global evil done by the Bush Administration, the second-largest share (after Cheney's heapin' helpin') will go to Don Rumsfeld. Not that Rumsfeld was as diabolically evil as Cheney; rather, as far as I can tell, he mostly didn't give a fuck. No body armor for the troops? Fuck it. Torture at Abu Ghraib? Whatever. Too-small US troop presence on the ground? Meh. Looting? *Shrug*. And here's some proof, from Fosco's continuing series of excerpts from Vanity Fair's "An Oral History of the Bush White House":

Kenneth Adelman, a member of Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board: So [Rumsfeld] says, It might be best if you got off the Defense Policy Board. You’re very negative. I said, I am negative, Don. You’re absolutely right. I’m not negative about our friendship. But I think your decisions have been abysmal when it really counted.

Start out with, you know, when you stood up there and said things—“Stuff happens.” I said, That’s your entry in Bartlett’s. The only thing people will remember about you is “Stuff happens.” I mean, how could you say that? “This is what free people do.” This is not what free people do. This is what barbarians do. And I said, Do you realize what the looting did to us? It legitimized the idea that liberation comes with chaos rather than with freedom and a better life. And it demystified the potency of American forces. Plus, destroying, what, 30 percent of the infrastructure.

I said, You have 140,000 troops there, and they didn’t do jack shit. I said, There was no order to stop the looting. And he says, There was an order. I said, Well, did you give the order? He says, I didn’t give the order, but someone around here gave the order. I said, Who gave the order?

So he takes out his yellow pad of paper and he writes down—he says, I’m going to tell you. I’ll get back to you and tell you. And I said, I’d like to know who gave the order, and write down the second question on your yellow pad there. Tell me why 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq disobeyed the order. Write that down, too.

And so that was not a successful conversation.

While it's always nice to hear of someone within the Administration who was willing to criticize Rumsfeld, Kenneth Adelman is no prize pig. After all, he's the one who wrote the 2002 Washington Post editorial entitled "Cakewalk in Iraq," which not only promised a quick and easy victory in Iraq but also raised the troops' expectations of a warzone filled with delicious cakes. I don't have to tell you that those expectations have been horribly shattered. In fact, there is little evidence of any cake-related activity in Iraq (nor has there ever been).

(However, Adelman did endorse Obama in 2008, so I guess that's pretty good.)

Incoherent Ravings of a Nazi (Not Tom Cruise!)

It's like that Paula Abdul reality show--Fosco knows he shouldn't pay attention, but he cannot look away. That's how he feels about the whole neo-Nazi cake imbroglio which is churning the blogosphere today (even here at Fosco Lives!). Obviously, it's just not reasonable to get upset and spill so much (virtual) ink whenever some white trash troglodyte does something half-witted. And yet, there is just something about this story that makes Fosco want to try to work through it (again and again...).

Well, things got even more inexplicable today as little Adolf Hitler's father spoke to the national press. Some highlights:

"I think people need to take their heads out of the cloud they've been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past."

"There's a new president and he says it's time for a change; well, then it's time for a change."

"Yeah, they [the Nazis] were bad people back then. But my kids are little. They're not going to grow up like that."

"Other kids get their cake. I get a hard time. It's not fair to my children. How can a name be offensive?"

Maddening. I think it's pretty clear that this guy is not playing the same language game as the rest of us. I mean, there is absolutely no evidence of a semi-coherent worldview behind these statements. And by "semi-coherent worldview," I don't mean a logically-rigorous philosophy of life (who amongst us has that?); rather, I mean something more like an everyday understanding of reality. What is this guy? Some kind of schizophrenic? It's just so fascinating!

Little Nazis Everywhere

See that kid? The first surprise is that he's a boy. The second surprise is that he's named Adolf Hitler. Consequently, the third surprise is not much of a surprise: he lives in a mobile home.

Sadly, this rural New Jersey (really?) toddler has come to the attention of America because the local supermarket refused to frost his name on a cake (apparently, the decorator didn't want the cake to end up on Cake Wrecks [UPDATE: Unbeknownst to Fosco, Cake Wrecks ran with this story yesterday and was sorry.]).

More interesting, of course, is the window on this trainwreck of an American family. Sadly, authorities allowed these people to have three kids:

JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell and Adolf Hitler Campbell.

Good names for a trio of toddlers? Heath and Deborah Campbell think so. The Holland Township couple has picked those names and the oldest child, Adolf Hitler Campbell, turns 3 today.

And yes, "Honszlynn Hinler" is not a typo. It's also not the name of a Nazi (as far as Fosco can tell). Were they trying for Himmler?

Skeptical? Luckily, the local paper also included a photo gallery showing the kids' birth certificates (as well as some of the decor at the Campbell home--yes, it's as bad as you think).

Hold on. Let's just stop for a minute. Where the fuck is Child Protective Services in New Jersey? How does this not qualify as child abuse? Fosco almost wants to call this one in himself.

Fosco estimates that young Adolf has about two or three more years before his upbringing turns him into a permanently-twisted, repulsive little monster. The clock is ticking, State of New Jersey...